The Source Filmmaker (SFM) is the movie-making tool built and used by the staff at Valve to make movies inside the Source game engine. Because the SFM uses the same assets as the game, anything that exists in the game can be used in the movie, and vice versa. By utilizing the hardware rendering power of a modern gaming PC, the SFM allows storytellers to work in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get environment so they can iterate in the context of what it will feel like for the final audience.

To celebrate the announcement of the SFM, They've also released "Meet the Pyro", the ninth installment in the "Meet the Team" series. Like all of Their animated shorts, They made it using the SFM.

If you're interested in making movies and games in parallel, sign up for an SFM beta key and start shooting your movie on location inside the world of TF2 today.

Source just never ceases to amaze me.. people keep complaining that the Source engine is old and a new one is need, this clearly shows just how wrong those people are. still a ton of things possible with this engine. even graphics wise. just look at some of the horror mods for source out there. those tend to show just amazing you make a map in source look. and i'm sure we all remember just how stunning 'Dear Esther' looks.

awesome project and i can't wait to see what all those really talented people out there come up with :)

Or...You could sign up for the beta? Besides, they're releasing it for free at some point eventually(I think).

But yeah, Source is really great - Not only can it do just about any genre of game at this point, but it can also do movies! A really cool feature they mentioned is the one where you can have real gameplay in there, and custom animations at the same time - And changing the gameplay animations. Really cool stuff, I can't wait to play around with it.

oh good I want this so bad, but I heard that when you render the vid with the older version of the filmaker (from the beta) there was something about it coming out really slow or something and that you had to put it into another video editor to fix it. I doubt that windows movie maker could fix it :\